


Wonder

by Yeah_JSmith



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Gen, Hugs, Mutual Pining, but neither of them knows yet, characters being sweet to each other, fluffy friendship, missing moment, pansexual Judy, serious talk for a second, supportive friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 02:45:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13354848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeah_JSmith/pseuds/Yeah_JSmith
Summary: Friendship is giving your heart to someone, knowing they could take a bite or crush it or throw it away, and trusting that they won't. It's an honor and a responsibility. And despite the danger, it's easier than you might expect.





	Wonder

**Author's Note:**

> Another one-off because Jay lacks self-control.

She almost missed the way his face lit up when she asked him to move in, because his paws were highly distracting. Nick, fresh from the academy and as healthy as he’d tried to convince her he was when he’d gone in, kept doing a – a  _ thing  _ to her ears with the tips of his claws that made her eyes droop and her spine tingle, but for the briefest moment between strokes he paused and looked at her like she was something new.

And then it was gone.

“Not so sure that’s a good idea, Carrots,” he said, gently massaging the base of her left ear. It was like he didn’t want to stop touching her. She didn’t want him to stop, either. Public grooming was just a step below public kissing or something equally deviant, but Judy couldn’t bring herself to care when he leaned down to murmur into the ear he wasn’t massaging, “You live in a cereal box.”

She hung onto her seat tightly as the train stuttered to a stop, hoping that he couldn’t hear her heart the way she could hear his. Nick was always so cool. His heartbeat was always just a tad faster than she expected whenever they had a spare moment to see each other, but the only other red fox she knew was Gideon Grey, whose base heart rate was probably slow because of a medical problem or…

The thought dissipated as Nick’s paw slipped down her neck and onto her shoulder. He patted her once and withdrew, putting an inch between them. Peripherally, Judy saw an older llama giving Nick the stink-eye. Of  _ course  _ it had to be another mammal’s judgment that broke through their little post-academy bubble. Judy had hoped to stay inside of it until his graduation ceremony, which would happen in three days, but that was clearly not going to happen.

“And anyway,” he said, raising his voice a little, “how am I supposed to bring vixens home if I have to explain that I share my cereal box with a bunny cop and her horde of stuffed animals? Heyyy, Sheila, come on in. I swear she’s not my parole officer.”

“Y-yeah,” Judy said helplessly, trying to grab hold of the conversation. The llama had moved on with a cluck once Nick had used the word  _ vixens,  _ but Judy was not so reassured. She couldn’t picture him snuggled up to some hot young thing named Sheila. Or, more precisely, she didn’t want to. She was sure any Sheila would love to snuggle up to him. He was fluffy and in good shape and he had very soft paws. But if there were some Sheila, or a dozen Sheilas that slowly decreased to one, then maybe Nick would be too busy for boring little Judy Hopps. He would see how good life could be and he’d get a better partner and marry Sheila and grow old and she’d see him graying across the station as his kits grew up and when he was Captain Wilde he’d tell stories about the weird, kinda pathetic bunny who’d once tricked him into going straight, and  _ wonder what happened to her, she probably went back to Bunnyburrow and lives with a bunch of pet garter snakes – _

No, she wasn’t going to allow those thoughts space to grow. Her laugh sounded weak even to her own ears, but maybe he wouldn’t notice if she talked fast enough. “You’ve probably got some fancy apartment to go back to anyway. Why would you want to downgrade? Forget it, I’m just a dumb bunny.”

“You are  _ not  _ dumb, Judy,” he said softly, and for a moment she thought he was going to pet her again, but he glanced at the llama and scooted a little further away. “And there’s nothing  _ just  _ about you.”

It was so much easier to be strong and brave in the face of opposition. Judy had conditioned herself to respond aggressively to unfairly negative perception. It was easy to give smug retorts to animals who underestimated her; it was practically her side job. But she didn’t really know how to respond to someone building her up instead of tearing her down. The only mammal to do so in recent memory had been a terrorist hell-bent on destroying the city through fear. 

And then there was Nick, who just thoughtlessly praised her, even though she hadn’t done much to earn it. Nick, who’d faithfully texted her every night and called once per week during his training. Nick, whose idea of an “I’m not dead” text was to take popular lyrics, shuffle them through Zoogle Translate a few times, and send her the results with no explanation. Nick, who had trusted her assessment of him enough to drop his whole life to pursue something new at her side.

She ran her paw along the top of his briefly, just to feel his fur again, and retreated feeling selfish and strange. 

“I-I’ll just go back to where I was living previously,” he said, the hitch in his voice matching the increase in his pulse. 

“Right. You and I will just meet up at the station every morning.  _ Sans  _ vixens.”

“...Yeah,” he replied, giving her a funny look before turning to look out the window at the city as they thundered through it. “But if you plan to date a red vixen named Marian Grace, look out. She’s not a fan of flowers. No idea how she feels about  _ carrots,  _ though, so maybe it’s worth a shot.”

Judy thought about Ruby Harfang from the bar, whose claws were so pretty Judy wouldn’t allow herself to look at them for more than ten seconds per night and whose smile had eaten up more tips than her mixing skills, and couldn’t muster up the motivation to joke back.

* * *

The day after graduation, Judy inadvertently beat Nick home. She had hoped never to have to explain to him that she took a weekly pilgrimage to the bridge Finnick had directed her to that day she had come back for Nick, because she didn’t know how to explain the reasons. Maybe it wasn’t as complicated as it felt, but after he had left for the ZPA Judy had found herself spiraling, unsure of herself, wondering if she even  _ could  _ be a good cop on her own, and going back to that bridge was a habit of comfort. Although Nick had started out just as condescending and disbelieving as everyone else, had torn her down in the same ways she had come to expect from everyone who heard what she did for a living, had been  _ immeasurably  _ cruel, he had also been the first mammal to recognize her worth as an officer. Not as an affirmative action project, not as a pawn, but as an officer of the law. 

It had been a hard day. Her temporary partner, a boar named Porcino, had the attention span of a flea and the sense of humor of a high school bully, which allowed for some harsh, demeaning comments to slip through on a regular basis. And then there was the stuff she heard from her own coworkers. It was nothing she couldn’t handle, and mostly work was great, but the little things built up day after day after day, and with her own partner laughing along with perps’ jokes at her expense...well, it got to her.

“Cute,” she said aloud, leaning against the paw-rail. “Cute, cute,  _ cute.” _

Someone had left a pile of pebbles under the railing, and every time Judy was frustrated during her bridge time, she allowed herself up to three throws. If she made it to the end of the year without running out, she would splurge on a space heater. There were six left.

She threw a pebble over the side and deepened her voice, mimicking the jerk from their last traffic stop. “That attitude would look better on my floor with that uniform and cute little toy badge.” And then, in another voice, “Don’t you have a farm to get back to? My food doesn’t grow itself.” And another. “Chief sent his  _ pet  _ to deliver the reports? Hop back to your owner and tell him to stop wasting my time. Can you remember that?”

She had been so absorbed in her mockery that she hadn’t been listening for others, so Nick’s voice from behind her was a surprise. “Cripes, do mammals really talk to you like that?”

She looked at him over her shoulder before returning her gaze to the cracked earth below. She wanted to reassure him, to wave it off, but she was tired and sad and off-guard, so she just shrugged. “You did.”

He moved forward to lean next to her. She felt small and uncomfortable next to him, but she didn’t move. “Yeah, but I had a  _ reason.  _ You had-”

“Followed you and questioned you about a crime I had reason to believe you’d committed? Wasted your time with  _ stupid baseless accusations  _ when I wasn’t going to last long anyway? At least you kept it clean. Called me a stuffed animal instead of – of saying you would  _ allow me  _ to suck you off if I promised to forget what I saw.” She threw another pebble, harder this time. “Porcino usually steps in if it goes that way, but he’s kind of...absent-minded. He doesn’t always hear everything. And the other officers don’t mean anything by it; they tease each other too. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before. Frankly, it’s amateur stuff, and I’m just overreacting. Gooseberry tells me all the time I should stop being so irrational or nobody will take me seriously.”

“Yeah, they’ll do that,” he told her, sounding bitter. “Make you feel like it’s  _ you.  _ You’re too emotional, you’re just not smart enough to understand that they’re showing they like you, you can’t  _ take a joke.  _ You know. This is why nobody likes your species, you’re so temperamental and volatile.”

At one point, Judy would have taken that literally, but she knew enough now to know that he wasn’t talking about her. Quietly, she added, “You’re the one who chose to make life harder for yourself. What did you think would happen if you tried to take something that clearly wasn’t meant for you? Just give up. Go home. You’re never going to belong, and there’s no shame in that.”

Nick slumped. “So it’s just more of the same?”

“No,” she told him fervently. “For every mean comment there are two nice ones. For every Porcino there’s a Fangmeyer – you’ll meet them, Fangmeyer’s brilliant – and the work is good. It’s just little things. Half the comments, I wouldn’t even know about if I didn’t have built-in laser listening, so really it’s partially my fault…”

“It’s not. They shouldn’t be talking about you like this at all.” He reached over to pet her ears, like he had apparently come to love doing now that he was no longer attending the academy. “We’re not that different. I thought we were, when we met, because bunnies are ancestrally strict herbivores, the  _ ultimate  _ prey, and you’re a protected-class species to boot. It didn’t ever occur to me to research why that is. I’m sorry I said those things to you.”

“I basically profiled you. I kind of deserved it anyway.”

“No, you didn’t.” Nick used his paw to turn her face toward him and Judy had the weird thought that he was going to kiss her, like a stupid scene from a teen romance. She hoped he wouldn’t. Satisfying kisses rooted in mutual despair were about as real as unicorns, and anyway, he wasn’t –  _ she  _ wasn’t – the thought never completed itself because he continued, “If we all got a pass just because someone else acted like a jerk, nobody would ever be decent to anybody.”

That was not wrong, but his paw was on her head again, and thinking was hard. She hadn’t realized claw-tips could feel  _ so good,  _ but Nick’s paw was better than her special furbrush. Pointier, more precise. Somehow gentler, too, perhaps because he was controlling the motion. She hummed and murmured, “Don’t worry about it, in any case. You’re going to love working with me, I promise. If anybody says anything mean about you, I’ll show them what for.”

His smile was toothy and gleaming, and Judy wanted to wrap herself in the shine. “Why don’t you show them what for when they talk about you?”

“Well, because it shouldn’t matter,” she explained. She wasn’t sure why he looked confused, but she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so she changed the subject. “Why are you here, Nick?”

He withdrew, managing to look both bashful and confrontational at the same time. “I live here. Obviously.”

“But I thought...that you had a place.”

“I do. Here.”

Judy’s eyes narrowed. “You mean to tell me that you’ve been living under a bridge for days now – and some undetermined time before – and you didn’t  _ tell  _ me? Nick! I told you that you could move in with me!”

“It’s  _ fine,”  _ he said, rolling his eyes. 

“Fine?”

“You don’t...you don’t have to do stuff like that for me. I can take care of myself. A couple of paychecks and I’ll find a place, and...don’t put yourself out for me, Carrots. Yes, it’s fine.”

The look on his face was heartbreaking, in a way that few things were. Judy had never been wonderful at interpreting vocal and facial cues even with other bunnies, but it was very clear that Nick didn’t think she  _ wanted  _ him, that she’d just offered him charity, and it was funny because his expression was torn between indignance and what she might call hope in anybody but Nick. 

She reached out and grabbed his tie, stepping into him. His breath hitched and his heart sped up, but she ignored it out of politeness and time constraints. This was  _ important.  _ “I’m not putting myself out for you. I wasn’t asking out of pity, or to offer charity. I asked you to move in with me because I  _ want  _ you there. Because I want my best friend with me. Because I want to fight over space in the freezer with you, and I want to wake you up in the morning, and I want to commute together. If you don’t want to stay with me for other reasons, tell me and I won’t say any more about it. But if you said no because you think I didn’t mean it...please reconsider. Even if it’s only until you find a place of your own.”

Nick pulled her close and put his arms around her, a rough and tight hug from someone who wasn’t used to doing it. Judy didn’t mind. She enjoyed every bit of contact they had. They stood there like that for a while and she pretended not to notice his shaking. It wasn’t assent, but it wasn’t a no, either, and it didn’t matter how bad her day had been, because her best friend was there with her.

**Author's Note:**

> Judy is hard, but I'm working on voices. Yay or nay?


End file.
